Re: Unexpected network error
On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> On Friday, September 26 at 12:39 PM, quoth Ravi Uday:
>>> That's awfully small. You can make them bigger (e.g. timeout=300,
>>> imap_keepalive=60, or even larger). I know the man page makes it sound
>>> like timeout really needs to be extra small, but don't sweat it. The
>>> default is 600, and you generally don't really need it anywhere near
>>> as small as 15. Think about that: that's potentially checking your
>>> email every 15 seconds. Depending on the number of mailboxes you have
>>
>> Well 600 is damn big, check your emails every 10mins !! How did
>> you(they) arrive at this number?
>
> Generally, over IMAP, the *best* way to do it is to use IMAP's IDLE
> extension. What happens is that the IMAP server will *notify* you when
> you get mail, rather than having you constantly ask it "now? how about
> now? now? now? what about now?", and mutt fully supports the IDLE
> feature (better than some IMAP servers do, actually).
>
> Anyway, I don't know where the 10 minute default came from in the
> beginning, but I think it's quite reasonable.
>
>> Outlook does it every 20 secs or lesser.
>
> No, I'm afraid you're mistaken.
>
> http://email.about.com/od/outlookexpresstips/qt/et052206.htm says:
>
> Decide on how often you want Windows Mail or Outlook Express to
> look for new mail. Typical values are between 10 and 60 minutes.
>
> www.outlook-tips.net/beginner/autosr.htm says:
>
> You should not check it more often than every 8 -10 min because it
> creates too much load on your mail server and a large amount of
> mail will cause some versions of Outlook to hang if it is still
> downloading mail when the next automatic mail pass starts.
>
> I also just loaded up my copy of VirtualBox to check out Microsoft
> Outlook 2000 myself. The default setting for new accounts is to check
> for new messages every 10 minutes, and it's *impossible* to change
> that setting to less than 1 minute (you can see a screen shot of the
Well I am not mistaken. I dont know which version you are using or looked at:
Here is mine : MS Office Outlook 2003 (11.8...) SP3
And in there I can clearly set it at 1 minute.
(Goto : Tools->Send/Receive --> Send-Receive-Settings --> Define
Send/Receive groups)
In there you can see the least allowed is 1 min.
I also spoke with network-admin and he confirmed its in the order of secs.
Practically, I also asked my colleague to send me a email. And within
20-30secs it was there in my Outlook.
> dialog box here: http://www.memoryhole.net/~kyle/outlook.png - note
> the "Check for new messages every" config option in the center of the
> dialog box).
>
>> And its better to get your mails fast then wait for 10mins..
>
> Ummm, okay... I think if someone has something that important to say,
> they should use a medium other than email (such as the phone). Email
> transmission can easily introduce delays of several minutes, long
> before you even have the chance to receive it.
>
>> Since I use mutt in a corporate n/w, it doesnt matter if its
>> 10secs/20secs.
>
> The speed of your network doesn't matter. What matters is the load and
> response time of your IMAP server. I know mail admins (good ones) that
> have warned their users against checking mail more often than every 5
> minutes, despite the fact that most of their clients use a full-duplex
> 100 Base-T ethernet connection to connect to the server (and some use
> gigabit). It's not necessarily the bandwidth, but also the disk I/O -
> when you've got 20+ people all checking their entire folder
> hierarchies constantly, that can kill your server.
>
> Just as an experiment, see how long it takes for the following command
> to kill your computer (or just imagine it; trust me, your computer
> will quickly become unusable):
>
> while true; do find $HOME >/dev/null & done
>
> ...or, even more fun:
>
> while true; do
> find $HOME -type f -exec tail {} \; >/dev/null &
> done
>
> Now, granted, there are ways that you may be able to mitigate the
> problem, and let's not get into questions of how powerful and/or
> efficient and/or well-configured your mail server is. The fact of the
> matter is: checking your mail that quickly (every few seconds) over
> and over again is not only uncommon, but generally a really bad
> idea---even on a corporate network.
>
Well most commonly all your terminals(PCs) will be wired to a VLAN operating
over a catalyst giga-bit switches. It has the capacity to switch
packets at x-gigs per secs and we
are here talking of kb's of mail data. Its negligence IMO.
- Ravi
> If you really MUST have your mail that fast (assuming your IMAP server
> doesn't support the IDLE command), then a better option would be to
> have your email forwarded to your local computer as it comes in, so
> you can check your inbox as often as you want without causing anyone
> else any trouble.
>
> ~Kyle
> - --
> No one loves armed missionaries.
> -- Maximilien Robespierre
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